XAMPP tutorial: in­stall­a­tion and first steps

Since an active antivirus programme can neg­at­ively affect the in­stall­a­tion process, it’s re­com­men­ded to tem­por­ar­ily pause any antivirus software until all XAMPP com­pon­ents have suc­cess­fully been installed.

User Account Control (UAC) can interfere with the XAMPP in­stall­a­tion because it limits writing access to the C: drive, so we recommend you de­ac­tiv­ate this too for the duration of the in­stall­a­tion process. To find out how to turn off your UAC, head to the Microsoft Windows support pages.

After you’ve opened the .exe file (after de­ac­tiv­at­ing your antivirus programme(s) and taken note of the User Account Control, the start screen of the XAMPP setup wizard should appear auto­mat­ic­ally. Click on ‘Next’ to configure the in­stall­a­tion settings.

Under ‘Select Com­pon­ents’, you have the option to exclude in­di­vidu­al com­pon­ents of the XAMPP software bundle from the in­stall­a­tion. But for a full local test server, we recommend you install using the standard setup and all available com­pon­ents. After making your choice, click ‘Next’.

In this next step, you have the chance to choose where you’d like the XAMPP software packet to be installed. If you opt for the standard setup, then a folder with the name XAMPP will be created under C:\ for you. After you’ve chosen a location, click ‘Next’.

Once all the afore­men­tioned pref­er­ences have been decided, click to start the in­stall­a­tion. The setup wizard will unpack and install the selected com­pon­ents and save them to the des­ig­nated directory. This process can take several minutes in total. You can follow the progress of this in­stall­a­tion by keeping an eye on the green loading bar in the middle of the screen.

Your Firewall may interrupt the in­stall­a­tion process to block the some com­pon­ents of the XAMPP. Use the cor­res­pond­ing check box to enable com­mu­nic­a­tion between the Apache server and your private network or work network. Remember that making your XAMPP server available for public networks isn’t re­com­men­ded. 

Once all the com­pon­ents are unpacked and installed, you can close the setup wizard by clicking on ‘Finish’. Click to tick the cor­res­pond­ing check box and open the XAMPP Control Panel once the in­stall­a­tion process is finished.

Controls for the in­di­vidu­al com­pon­ents of your test server can be reached through the XAMPP Control Panel. The clear user interface logs all actions and allows you to start or stop in­di­vidu­al modules with a single. The XAMPP Control Panel also offers you various other buttons, including:

• Config: allows you to configure the XAMPP as well as the in­di­vidu­al com­pon­ents
• Netstat: shows all running processes on the local computer
• Shell: opens a UNIX shell
• Explorer: opens the XAMPP folder in Windows Explorer
• Services: shows all services currently running in the back­ground
• Help: offers links to user forums
• Quit: closes the XAMPP Control Panel

In­di­vidu­al modules can be started or stopped on the XAMPP Control Panel through the cor­res­pond­ing buttons under ‘Actions’. You can see which modules have been started because their names are high­lighted green under the ‘Module’ title.

If a module can’t be started as a result of an error, you’ll be informed of this straight away in red font. A detailed error report can help you identify the cause of the issue. 

A common source of error connected with Apache is blocked ports. If you’re using the standard setup, then XAMPP will assign the web server to main port 80 and the SSL port 443. The latter of these par­tic­u­larly is often blocked by other pro­grammes. In the example above, it’s likely that the Tomcat port is being blocked, meaning the web server can’t be started. There are three ways to solve this issue:

• Change the con­flict­ing port: Let’s assume for the sake of example that the instant messenger programme Skype is blocking SSL port 443 (this is a common problem). One way to deal with this issue is to change Skype’s port settings. To do this, open the programme and navigate via ‘Actions’, ‘Options’, and ‘Advanced’, until you reach the ‘Con­nec­tions’ menu. You should find a box checked to allow Skype access to ports 80 and 443. Deselect this checkbox now.

• Change the XAMPP module port settings: Click the Config button for the module in question and open the files httpd.conf and httpd-ssl.conf. Replace port number 80 in httpd.conf and port number 443 in httpd-ssl.conf with any free ports, before saving the file data. Now click on the general Config button on the right-hand side and select ‘Services and Ports Settings’. Customise the ports for the module server to reflect the changes in the conf files.

• End the con­flict­ing programme: The simplest way to avoid port conflicts in the short term is to end the con­flict­ing programme (Skype in this case). If you restart Skype after your XAMPP module servers are already running, it will select a different port and your issue will be resolved.

You have an ‘Admin’ option located on the Control Panel for every module in your XAMPP.

• Click on the Admin button of your Apache server to go to the web address of your web server. The Control Panel will now start in your standard browser, and you’ll be led to the dashboard of your XAMPP’s local host. The dashboard features numerous links to websites for useful in­form­a­tion as well as the open source project BitNami, which offers you many different ap­plic­a­tions for your XAMPP, like WordPress or other content man­age­ment systems. Al­tern­at­ively, you can reach the dashboard through localhost/dashboard/.

• You can use the Admin button of your database module to open phpMy­Ad­min. Here, you can manage the databases of your web projects that you’re testing on your XAMPP. Al­tern­at­ively, you can reach the ad­min­is­tra­tion section of your MySQL database via localhost/phpmy­ad­min/.